The New Combat, November 9th, 2009
by William Johnney
Twenty Years On: The Berlin Wall and Alexander Zinoviev
Again, on the anniversary: My little memoir of when the world changed. Today’s NY Times coverage. Including a first report of Clamor in the East.
A Berlin Wall Quiz at Germany’s Der Spiegel. Great coverage there. The East German colonel who opened the first portal. Nice to see Gorbachev on the streets today in Berlin. But his partner, willy nillly, in peaceful disassembling, Lech Walesa, offers only backhanded compliments. Here’s Gorby’s successor, the young Russian president Dmitri Medvedev, as to how the Wall’s fall “united us again.”
“Again?” one might wonder, thinking of the Teutonic Knights battling Alexander Nevsky, and of course the recent war.
But Germans and Russians were indeed allies (of a disorganized sort) against Bonaparte. And for much of early modernity German royalty and high footmen ran the Russian state. That famous equestrienne Catherine the Great, to begin …
I recall Alexander Zinoviev, during a wondrous six-hour chat in Munich in March 1990, suggesting I beware a renewed bonding of Germany and the eastern colossus:
ZINOVIEV: What do you think, the possibility of world war does not exist? It would be a very big simplification to consider the situation in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union only from just one point of view. …
TNC: Assuming that the states involved want peace — perhaps that’s a large assumption — what’s the best solution of what they call the German Question of reunification?
ZINOVIEV: Best solution? For who, the Soviet Union?
TNC: For peace.
ZINOVIEV: For peace ?!
TNC: To prevent a world war.
ZINOVIEV: It is too abstract an approach. The unification of Germany from my point of view will increase the danger of a new world war. Germany can destroy the balance in Western Europe and the world.
TNC: What about NATO and Warsaw Pact? Should Germany be neutral —
ZINOVIEV: Warsaw Pact doesn’t play a very important role. The East German army is ready to be destoryed, to join the West German army. The Czechoslovakian army is nothing, the Hungarian army is nothing — Warsaw Pact?! What is the Warsaw Pact?! it is the Soviet army! The Soviet army and Western Europe.
From the military point of view, for the Soviet Union, it is no longer necessary to keep its army in Eastern Europe. Today’s weapon is of such a kind that the Soviet Union can send its rockets to the United States, you know, and if it is necessary to occupy Eastern Europe, the Soviet army is able to make that in two days.
Gradually, it seems to me, there is going to be a struggle between the Soviet Union and the United States. The Soviet Union wants to push the Americans from Europe. I thought some years ago that it was ready to betray, to sell, East Germany, under conditions that the Americans would leave Europe.
Together with Germany, the Soviet Union can control Western Europe completely. It lost East Germany, but it can win the whole Germany. As a partner. Not only a trading partner, but a military partner, perhaps. It is senseless to divide the different aspects of life.
Gorby & Erich Honneker, Oct 6, 1989, as Raisa looks on.